Sissinghurst

by Vita Sackville-West

  ‘“Besides,” they say, “it gives us a lot of trouble to grow.” It is only half-hardy in this country, and thus has to be sown in a seed box under glass in February or March; pricked out; and then planted out in May where we want it to flower. We have to be very careful not to water the seedlings too much, or they will damp off and die. On the other hand, we must never let the grown plant suffer from drought. Then, when we have planted it out, we have to be on the look-out for slugs, which have for zinnias an affection greatly exceeding our own. Why should we take all this trouble about growing a flower which we know is going to be cut down by the first autumn frost?

  ‘Such arguments crash like truncheons, and it takes an effort to renew our determination by recalling the vivid bed which gave us weeks of pleasure last year. For there are few flowers more brilliant without being crude, and since they are sun-lovers the maximum of light will pour on the formal heads and array of colours. The disadvantage of growing them in seed boxes as a half-hardy annual may be overcome by sowing them where they are to remain, towards the end of May. I do believe that you get sturdier plants in the long run, when the seedlings have suffered no disturbance. Sow the seeds in little parties of three or four, and thin them remorselessly out when they are about two inches high, till only one lonely seedling remains. It will do all the better for being lonely, twelve inches away from its nearest neighbour. It will branch and bulge sideways if you give it plenty of room to develop, and by August or September will have developed a spread more desirable in plants than in human beings.

  ‘In zinnias, you get a mixture of colours seldom seen in any other flower: straw-colour, greenish-white, a particular saffron-yellow, a dusky rose-pink, a coral-pink. The only nasty colour produced by the zinnia is a magenta, and this, alas, is produced only too often. When magenta threatens, I pull it up and throw it on the compost heap, and allow the better colours to have their way.

  ‘Whether we grow them in a mixture or separate the pink from the orange, the red from the magenta, is a matter of taste. [And] personally I like them … all by themselves, not associated with anything else.

  ‘As cut flowers they are invaluable: they never flop, and they last I was going to say for weeks.’

  AUTUMN

  With abundance and growth curves tailing off by the autumn, the more delicate plants again come into their own. Vita was interested in having some special intimate things for admiring specifically at this time.

  She so loved the colour of the gentian that she created a miniature garden, or ‘lawn’, devoted solely to it. She cleared the grass from a small square as you enter the Orchard from the White Garden, and in a similar style to her thyme lawn, made one filled only with gentians.

  Gentians, like polyanthus, struggle if they’re left in the same soil for year after year. They prefer to keep on the move, needing to colonise new ground to grow well. By the late 1960s, after twenty-five years, the gentian bed at Sissinghurst was no longer looking good, so Pam and Sybille took it out. It would be a spectacular thing to restore, moving it every few years to keep the colony growing well.

  ‘The blue trumpets of Gentiana sino-ornata have given great pleasure during September,’ Vita remarked in October 1949. ‘Some people seem to think they are difficult to grow, but, given the proper treatment, this is not true. They like semi-shade (I grow mine round the foot of an apple tree, which apparently suffices them in this respect); they like plenty of moisture, which does mean that you have to water them every other evening in an exceptionally dry summer; and they utterly abhor lime. This means that if you have a chalky soil you had better give up the idea of growing these gentians unless you are prepared to dig out a large, deep hole and fill it entirely with peat and leaf-mould.

  ‘It is a safe rule that those plants which flourish in a spongy mixture of peat and leaf-mould will not tolerate lime; and the gentians certainly revel in that sort of mixture. As a matter of fact, I planted mine in pure leaf-mould and sand without any peat, and they seem very happy … The boxful of plants I set out last autumn, the gift of a kind friend in Scotland who says she has to pull them up like weeds in her garden (lucky woman), have now grown into so dense a patch that I shall be able to treble it next year [which she did]. For the gentian has the obliging habit of layering itself without any assistance from its owner, and I have now discovered that every strand a couple of inches long has developed a system of sturdy white roots, so that I can detach dozens of little new plants in March without disturbing the parent crown, and, in course of time, can carpet yards of ground with gentian if I wish, and if my supply of leisure, energy, and leaf-mould will run to it.

  ‘Gentiana sino-ornata is very low-growing, four inches high at most, but although humble in stature it makes up for its dwarfishness by its brilliance of colour, like the very best bit of blue sky landing by parachute on earth. By one of those happy accidents which sometimes occur in gardening, I planted my gentians near a group of the tiny pink autumn cyclamen, Cyclamen europaeum, which flowers at exactly the same time. They look so pretty together, the blue trumpets of the gentian and the frail, frightened, rosy, ears-laid-back petals of the cyclamen: they share something of the same small, delicate quality. It is one of the happiest associations of flowers.

  ‘So please plant Gentiana sino-ornata in a leaf-mould shady bed in your garden, with an inter-planting of Cyclamen europaeum. The same conditions will suit them both.’

  She added a postscript a few weeks later:

  ‘Some weeks ago I wrote that the blue trumpets of Gentiana sino-ornata had given great pleasure during September. I little knew, then, how I was underestimating their value; so, in fairness to this lovely thing, I would like to state here and now, on this eighteenth day of November when I write this article, that I have to-day picked at least two dozen blooms from my small patch. They had avoided the gales by cowering close to the ground, but they had suffered some degrees of frost; they looked miserable and shut up; I hesitated to pick them, thinking that they were finished for the year; but now that I have brought them into a warm room and put them into a bowl under a lamp they have opened into the sapphire-blue one expects of the Mediterranean.

  ‘This mid-November bowl has so astonished me, and made me so happy, gazing at it, that I felt I must impart my delight to other people in the hope that they would begin to plant this gentian.’

  It’s sad the gentian patch is no longer at Sissinghurst.

  I remember coming across Ampelopsis heterophylla (which was called Vitis in Vita’s day) fifteen years ago against a house in Hastings and being stopped in my tracks by the beauty of its blue berries, stippled in navy, reminiscent of a shiny thrush’s egg. Its common name is porcelain berry vine, and you can see why. It fruits best in full sun with its roots restricted, so cram it in somewhere in a narrow bed below a wall or frame – it’s a good idea to keep it away from the guttering of the house. More of us should find a site for this extraordinary fruiting climber. It can become invasive in hot, humid climates, but it won’t get rampant here. Vita writes in 1947:

  ‘A vine which is giving me great pleasure at the moment is Vitis heterophylla, an East Asian. You can’t eat it, but you can pick it and put it in a little glass on your table, where its curiously coloured berries and deeply cut leaves look oddly artificial, more like a spray designed by a jeweller out of dying turquoises than like a living thing. Yet it will grow as a living thing, very rapidly, on the walls of your house, or over a porch, hanging in lovely swags of its little blue berries, rather subtle, and probably not the thing that your next-door neighbour will bother to grow or perhaps doesn’t know about. There are some obvious plants which we all grow: useful things, and crude. We all know about them. But the real gardener arrives at the point when he wants something rather out of the common run, and that is why I make these suggestions which might turn your garden into something a little different and a little more interesting than the garden of the man next door.’

  The berries of ampelopsis will keep u
s all going with delicate things to bring inside until the blossom of Prunus subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’ begins to appear in November. This is a little tree which, as its name suggests, ought to flower in autumn, and it ranks amongst Vita’s favourite plants. She loved many flowering shrubs but particularly this one, blooming at such a grey and gloomy part of the year, a small bough of it an exquisite and delicate thing:

  Autumn-flowering cherry Prunus subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’.

  ‘In England Prunus subhirtella autumnalis might more properly be called winter-flowering, for it does not open until November, but in its native Japan it begins a month earlier; hence its autumnal name. Here, if you pick it in the bud and put it in a warm room or a greenhouse, you can have the white sprays in flower six weeks before Christmas, and it will go on intermittently, provided you do not allow the buds to be caught by too severe a frost, until March … It was in full flower here in the open during the first fortnight of November; I picked bucketfuls of the long, white sprays; then came two nights of frost on November 15th and 16th; the remaining blossom was very literally browned-off; I despaired of getting any more for weeks to come. But ten days later, when the weather had more or less recovered itself, a whole new batch of buds was ready to come out, and I got another bucketful as fresh and white and virgin as anything in May.

  ‘There is a variety of this cherry called rosea, slightly tinged with pink; I prefer the pure white myself, but that is a matter of taste … It is perhaps too ordinary to appeal to the real connoisseur – a form of snobbishness I always find hard to understand in gardeners – but its wands of white are of so delicate and graceful a growth, whether on the tree or in a vase, that it surely should not be condemned on that account. It is of the easiest cultivation, content with any reasonable soil, and it may be grown either as a standard or a bush; I think the bush is preferable, because then you get the flowers at eye-level instead of several feet above your head – though it can also look very frail and youthful, high up against the pale blue of a winter sky.

  ‘There is also another winter-flowering cherry, Prunus serrulata Fudanzakura, which I confess I neither grow nor know, and I don’t like recommending plants of which I have no personal experience, but the advice of Captain Collingwood Ingram, the “Cherry” Ingram of Japanese cherry fame, is good enough for me and should be good enough for anybody. This, again, is a white single-flowered blossom with a pink bud, and may be admired out of doors or picked for indoors any time between November and April. So obliging a visitor from the Far East is surely to be welcomed to our gardens.

  ‘By the way, I suppose all those who like to have some flowers in their rooms even during the bleakest months are familiar with the hint of putting the cut branches, such as the winter-flowering cherry, into almost boiling hot water? It makes them, in the common phrase, “jump to it” [see here for more flower-conditioning advice].’

  10

  INDOOR AND CONTAINER GARDENING

  Nigel standing by one of Vita’s troughs at Long Barn in the 1920s.

  As an extension of her devotion to delicate, painterly plants, Vita was keen on containers. There you could see the intricacy of these things eye to eye, so to speak. She erected a series of shallow sinks and deeper stone troughs in the Top Courtyard to enable her to make some outdoor miniature gardens to house some of her favourites; and in 1936 she built a greenhouse attached to some stable buildings between the garden and the Victorian farmhouse. Victoria Sackville, Vita’s mother, had died that year, and left Vita some money. Putting up the greenhouse was one of the first things she did, and there she immediately started to build up a collection of bulb pans and terracotta pots full of interesting things. Under cover of glass she could force plants a bit early, bringing forward the spring, and grow a few delicacies that would have been damaged by the weather if left outside all year. It would be lovely to see the greenhouse and collection re-established to increase the garden’s richness in spring.

  INDOOR GARDENING

  Vita created a long, wide bed contained within the glass where she could grow a few plants which were not reliably frost-hardy – gerberas, Euphorbia marginata and borderline-hardy species of lilies such as Lilium auratum and L. nepalense. She describes her greenhouse as a ‘long lean-to, sloped against the brick wall of an old stable, and all along the foot of the wall runs a bed about six feet wide.

  ‘There are some flowers about which there is nothing interesting to say, except that they happen to have caught one’s fancy. Such a flower, so far as I am concerned, is Gerbera jamesonii. It has no historical interest that I know of; no long record of danger and difficulty attending its discovery; no background of savage mountains and Asiatic climates. It carries, in fact, no romantic appeal at all. It has taken no man’s life. It has to stand or fall on its own merits.

  ‘I first observed it in the window of a florist’s shop, neatly rising out of a gilt basket tied with pink ribbons. No more repellent presentation could be imagined, or anything more likely to put one against the flower for ever, yet somehow this poor ill-treated object struck me instantly as a lovely thing, so lovely that I suffered on its behalf to see it so misunderstood. I went in to inquire its name, but the young lady assistant merely gaped at me, as they nearly always do if one makes any inquiry about their wares unconnected with their price. “It’s a dysy of sorts,” she said’ – Vita revealing herself as the social snob she was.

  She went on: ‘It was only later, at a flower-show, that I discovered it to be Gerbera jamesonii, also called the Transvaal daisy. Neither name pleased me very much, but the flower itself pleased me very much indeed. It seemed to include every colour one could most desire, especially a coral pink and a rich yellow, and every petal as shiny and polished as a buttercup. Long, slender stalks and a clean, erect habit. It was altogether a very clean-looking flower; in fact it might have been freshly varnished.

  ‘The exhibitor was better informed than the florist’s young lady. It was only hardy in this country, he said, if it could be grown in very dry conditions at the foot of a warm wall, in which case it might be regarded as a reasonably hardy perennial. I know, however, that nurserymen are frequently more optimistic in their recommendations than they should be, so privately resolved to grow it in an un-heated greenhouse.’

  In fact, gerberas are surprisingly easy to grow, and long-flowering. They’re almost evergreen perennials in a greenhouse and produce flowering stems from May until October. You’ll readily find them in dwarf as well as tall-stemmed forms. Once cut, they last well in water for at least a couple of weeks. They’ve become a well-known florist’s flower, available in all sorts of colours including a delicious rich burgundy called ‘Chateau’.

  Gerbera jamesonii.

  If you have a cold greenhouse you could grow your own, as Vita explains. ‘I wonder indeed why those who are fortunate enough to possess such a lean-to, do not more frequently put it to this use. It is true that it entails sacrificing all the staging down one side of the house, but the gain is great. Staging means pots, and pots mean watering, and “potting on” if you are to avoid root-starvation, whereas plants set straight into the ground can root down to Australia if they like. You can, moreover, make up the soil to suit every separate kind; you can work under cover in bad weather; you can snap your fingers at hailstorms, late frosts, young rabbits, and even, to a certain extent, slugs. There is certainly a great deal to be said for this method of gardening.

  ‘I once saw a lean-to house which had been adapted in this way, with a special view to growing lilies. The wall had been distempered a light blue, of that peculiar shade produced by spraying vines with copper sulphate against the walls of farm-houses in Italy: in the centre was a sunk rectangular pool, with blue nymphaeae [waterlilies] growing in it and clumps of agapanthus at each of the four corners. Tall lilies rose straight and pure and pale against the curious blue of the wall. I liked best going into this house after dark, when the single electric reflector in the roof cast down a flood-lighting effect
more unreal and unearthly than anything I had ever seen.’

  It’s a good image, and one I have followed. I now grow many of my lilies in my cold greenhouse, where they flower pristine, away from the lily beetle, and make the whole place smell intoxicatingly good. Once they’ve died down, remember to label where they are carefully so you don’t slice them when you’re putting other stuff in.

  POTS FOR THE COLD GREENHOUSE

  WINTER

  Vita loved visiting her cold greenhouse in the winter, somewhere she could enjoy a blast of spring a few weeks earlier than in the garden.

  For this she had staging down one side where she could grow pans of her treasured small-scale plants – things to move in and out of the house, as well as to admire clustered together on the greenhouse bench. ‘There is no more amusing toy for the amateur gardener than a small greenhouse,’ she notes. ‘It need not necessarily be heated, if he can be satisfied with plants that do not dread the frosts of winter but whose fragile petals suffer from the onslaught of heavy rain or hail. Such plants are better grown under the covering of glass, that transparent canopy which admits the light and excludes the unkindly deluge descending from overhead.

  ‘Surely many owners of such small greenhouses have turned them into a sort of Alpine house by now, filled with pans of winter-flowering bulbs such as the little crocuses, and early irises.’